Spam Fighting Toolkit: How to Fight Email Spam

Spam Fighting Toolkit

by Ralph Tegtmeier

Fighting the never ending tide of spam mail can turn into a very frustrating experience if you don’t know the real tricks of the trade. After all, there’s a whole lot more to it than simply responding to a (usually bogus) From: address with a peevish complaint!

Here’s a fairly extensive overview of resources that will aid you in effectively combatting unsolicited email, showing you the possibilities (and, alas, the limits!) of your endeavor.

General resources

The Spamhaus Project features a database tracks known Spam Gangs, Spam Support Services and the providers who keep organized spamming alive by knowingly hosting stealth spamming services on their networks. An extensive set of databases allows for tracking of established spam outfits, including statistics, etc. http://www.spamhaus.org/

Protect your mail box with disposable email addresses by signing up with Sneakemail: this service forwards everything to your regular box without disclosing your real address. If you find your Sneakemail address is being abused, you can simply delete it. Plus, it will help you track down businesses that flog your address to third party marketers. Neat. http://sneakemail.com/

Free email forwarding claiming to sport the net’s best anti-spam filters can be found at Despammed.com. Basically, it works as a remote spam filter. (That’s why they term themselves a “mail filtration service”.) http://www.despammed.com/

Spamex takes a similar approach, offering disposable email addresses as a measure to counter spam. It doesn’t bother with sophisticated spam filters, though – the minute your Spamex address receives spam, simply nuke it and get a new one. You can also fit their log in box link into your web browser’s links bar for facilitated access. Their slogan is noteworthy, too: “Because Sending You Email is a Privilege Not a Right!” http://www.spamex.com/

One of the best known anti-spam forwarders is Spammotel (what a name!) which also offers a pretty sophisticated, award winning plug-in for your email client, allowing you to keep track of whom you have given which email address of yours. This, of course, makes it dead easy to test web sites’ privacy policy. Moreover, it makes for a great tool to help you organize the e-mail you actually do want to receive. (Windows only.) http://www.spammotel.com/

Webmasters running their own mail server may be interested in The MAPS Relay Spam Stopper, a queryable DNS-based database of spam-relaying mail servers. You can configure your server to utilize their list if you want to refuse mail from these types of servers. http://work-rss.mail-abuse.org/rss/

The same site offers the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL). This is a system for creating intentional network outages (“blackholes”) for the purpose of limiting the transport of known-to-be-unwanted mass e-mail. The RBL is a subscription-only system, working in such a manner that no one is denied connectivity to a non-RBLSM-subscriber. http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/

Reporting spam

This spam complaint primer spells it all out as it is and offers a sample complaint covering every important aspect of reporting spam to get spammers’ accounts and web sites terminated. ttp://combat.uxn.com/tracing.html

The all-time classic to report spam to is the not-for-profit Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC. http://mail-abuse.org/

The Network Abuse Clearinghouse is a complaint service that will forward your spam complaints to the culprits flooding your mail box. http://www.abuse.net/

The MMF Hall of Humiliation takes the approach of ridicule to combat spammers. Lots of parodies and spoofs of obnoxious unsolicited commercial emails, and more. Still, it has a very serious background, informing in detail about fraud indictments and offering rudimentary legal analysis of spam scams. http://ga.to/mmf/

UXN Spam Combat offers a nice one-page form aggregating all the tools you need to solve the spam problem, ranging from NSlookup and Trace Routing to Pings, decoding of obfuscated web URLs, etc. Very useful. http://combat.uxn.com/

This page offers you tools to “poison” the spambots with by feeding them tons of invalid email addresses. While this admittedly places some strain on bandwidth and system resources, it’s also pretty easy to crash a spammer’s system this way – ah, sweet revenge! http://fantomaster.com/faantispamtip2.html

Many spammers are now offering their pathetic wares not via the internet but offline, preferably using toll free numbers. This article outlines a strategy on where and how to hit them hard – in their pockets! http://fantomaster.com/faantispamtip3.html

Probably the most effective method of prevention is blocking spammers and their harvester bots from your web site altogether. This tip expounds the strategy to pursue. http://fantomaster.com/faantispamtip4.html

The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) is an international organization promoting anti-spam legislation. http://www.cauce.org/ They also publish “True Tales of Spam” here, where you may see your own story featured some day if you wish tp submit it: http://www.cauce.org/tales/index.shtml

This text may freely be republished or distributed provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com Ltd. (UK) and fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ > a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services. He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com